The Norwegian Museum Project

Access to and interconnection
between various resources of cultural and natural history

By Christian-Emil Ore, Research Director

Abstract for a poster at the 5th European Conference on Research
and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, September 4-9 2001,
Darmstadt, Germany.

Background

Norwegian university museums are custodians of large bodies of knowledge
and data about societies, culture, nature and the environment in Norway,
both historical and current. An important role of the university museums
has been the compilation and dissemination of this information. It is no
accident that museums have formed the nucleus for the founding of Norwegian
colleges and universities.

Due to the magnitude and the organisation of the university collections,
they have not been readily accessible for use in research, teaching and
public services or for inspection by the general public. In order to
maintain their position as the country's leading institutions and
information pools for object-based research, the university museums must
revitalise their collections. An important step in this process is the
introduction of information technology at all levels in the museums.
However, this calls for an extremely costly reassessment and conversion of
existing archives into a digital format, requiring extra effort and
additional funding. In some cases, establishing the databases will entail a
complete revision of some of the museum collections.

The project

The Museum Project was established in the spring of 1998 as a national
collaborative project involving all four Norwegian universities. It is
planned to run until 2005 with an annual budget of 1-2 million Euro. The
aim of the project is to develop common database systems for the management
of collections for all the Norwegian universities museums. Ideally, these
database systems should be able to handle all reference information related
to artefact and specimen collections inside and outside the museums.
Important aspects include internal requirements regarding the management of
collections, fieldwork, research and dissemination, and external demands
from the authorities and the public concerning access to reference data.
The work is motivated by an ambition to develop IT-based systems that will
offer users centralised and efficient access to information regarding the
Norwegian cultural and natural heritage. With the help of common user
interfaces and links between data from different fields of study, it will
be possible to generate new information combinations and new insights in
the various disciplines.

The Museum Project includes a systems development group that is responsible
for modelling and constructing the databases. This group is a direct
continuation of the systems development group in the Documentation Project.
In addition the project employs at least one scientific consultant from a
relevant discipline for each of the sub-projects. The consultant is
responsible for the follow-up of the scientific aspects of the digitisation
process and works in close co-operation with colleagues in the relevant
field and with the project's system developers.

The Museum Project involves the museums of natural history as well as the
museums of cultural history. It is organised in various subsections, with
sub-projects in the fields of archaeology, ethnography, cultural history,
botany, zoology, geology and palaeontology. Each of the sub-projects is
responsible for the digitisation of large collections; some so complex that
getting even an overview is difficult. Once the digitised material is
recorded, it undergoes a quality control procedure before being entered
into databases. The completed databases are all built on the same platform.
This implies that while each database accommodates the specific features of
each collection the different databases will nonetheless be compatible with
one another. The computer programs and methods used for the electronic
recording of data are determined by the structure of each collection, and
to some extent by the traditions of each discipline.

The museum system

Overview

The Norwegian University Museums cover a wide range of disciplines, from
archaeology and ethnography to natural history. The project organisation
has taken over the responsibility for maintaining and developing the data
base systems for the department of lexicography (old Norse and modern
Norwegian) and place name studies.

The development of the new systems has been a continuous process for the
last 6 years. It has been done in parallel with giving assistance to the
ongoing digitisation of the museum collections. The design and
implementation of the common systems and interfaces is now completed in its
first version and will be presented at the conference.

To make data base systems for the large number of disciplines is a
challenge for a small group. An extra challenge is the requirement for
interdisciplinary searches. The number of databases and the
inter-disciplinarily has forced us to try to make as generic database
solutions as possible. The new information systems replace in turn older,
mostly stand alone database applications. This is fortunate since it is
easier to create new interconnecting systems instead of connection old
ones, although technologies like the Z39.50 standard have open for
relatively easy interconnection of databases.

The system group has tried to think generically along two axis:

common interface tools and database functionality

common database solutions for common data types like geographical
data, bibliographical data, data about persons (legal and real),
classification systems in cultural and natural history and so on

An object oriented system model

In the modelling phase, each collection has been described as a set of
different object types. We will here use a simplified model for archaeology
as an example. The collections of an archaeological museum consist of
artefacts, classification and acquisition catalogues, excavation and
conservation reports, photos and so on. We have modelled this as object
types such as:

a type of artefact objects

a type of finding circumstances (stray finds and excavation) objects

a type of conservation objects

a transportation type

The latter used to describe the movement of the artefacts inside and
outside of the museum and is shared with other museums and collections.
Other shared object types are persons, publications and geographical places
(both natural formations and abstract geographical entities like counties
and municipalities).

Most database interfaces we meet in our every day lives have not very
elaborated tools for storing search result and for sharing such information
with colleagues. The Internet browsers have the bookmark or favourite
folders. Some museum and gallery databases are equipped with a possibility
to create more or less personal collections. In our work at the museums and
collection departments we got the understanding there is a wish among
scholars and scientists to have the possibility to build up their own
"databases" or notebooks based on the results from querying collection
databases. To meet this need we have designed list feature. Conceptually a
list is a set of objects of any of the object types in the system. A list
can be created by storing (a part of ) the result of a query or several
queries. Such lists are static in the sense that they are "hand picked",
but can be increased by adding new elements. A second type of lists is the
lists bound to queries. These are dynamic in the sense that the content
will changes according to the state of the databases. An example of such a
list will be the list containing all artefacts undergoing conservation or
books being lent out. The dynamic lists are useful to mimic the movement of
object in a collection. All lists can be private to a user, to a group or
public. A list can contain objects of a single type or objects of
heterogeneous object types.

Implementation

All the object types are implemented as relational databases in Oracle8i.
This is not an object oriented DBMS, but the object view of the data is
taken care of by a common meta database containing a subset of the data
model of each database (scheme). The user interface applications comes in
two versions, one advanced version implemented in DELPHI5 and a somewhat
simpler WWW-interfaced based on plain HTML and Java-scripts. Both versions
use the information in the meta database to automatically create a user
adjustable search forms and result tables or grids. In the DELPHI5 version
each object type is also supplied with one or more object viewers
presenting the data connected to a given object. That is, by clicking on a
line in the grid of result, a more detailed view of the data is presented.
In the photo database a digital photo filing card with detailed information
and a thumb is presented. In a dictionary database a formatted entry will
occur.

The second common feature of the system is the so-called list module. The
visual metaphor is the ordinary file hierarchy with nested folders and
files. The "file icons" represent stored queries, hand compiled lists of
parts of one or many search results. A list can consist of objects of
different types, say, photos from a site, information about artefacts and
excavation reports. The folder hierarchy is used to systematise the lists.
The lists and the folders can be global, shared by a group or private. When
opened, a heterogeneous list will be presented as a collection of icons and
some basic information. Each element can be inspected by a viewer
corresponding to its object type. A list of objects of the same type can
also be seen as a result grid with a predefined layout.
Summing up

The last ten years the Norwegian Museum Project and its predecessor the
Documentation Project have been major efforts to digitise information at
the University Museums and the collection department at the Norwegian
universities. Ten years ago there was little information electronically
available and the focus was on how to create digital resources. Today
almost all information produced is at some stage in the production process
on electronic form and there is perhaps too much information available
through the Internet. But a large majority of the older information is
still on a non-electronic form and most of it will very likely never be
digitised. The university museums are research institutions and will try to
convert as much as possible of their referential information to electronic
form and including it into a coherent information system. Today the
digitalisation is a well-developed process and the critical factor is
funding. Today major challenge seems to be to develop and integrate
electronic information systems into the everyday activity of the working
scholars and scientists and the interested public. This is both a technical
but also an organisational challenge.